I earlier promised posts on our experience as we begin to use Cinch and Connect. Here’s the first in a series.
As you Dubli Business Associates know, these are the programs built by Lariat Software that helps connect business associates with: 1) customers, 2) potential customers 3)other business associates and 4) potential business associates.
For those that have been with Dubli for awhile, you know that the launch of Cinch was a very highly anticipated event. It was to be the signal for all associates to begin launching their credits into cyberspace to start attracting new dubli customers.
Well, it finally arrived in mid-July after several false starts and a long delay. (Which is understandable for a brand new software/internet product.)
We weren’t sure that we were going to use it. We had been sending credits out and attracting customers without Cinch or Connect since February. We have developed a nice little system that seems to be working well.
But we decided to jump in and try it. We watched the first two Cinch training videos over the past few nights.
Last night, I subscribed to Connect and downloaded Cinch to my desktop. Here’s how it went:
I went to http://dubli-connect.com and found a login screen with no way to register and no instructions. It didn’t look like the screen I remembered from the training videos. So, I went to my e-mail to find the message that announced the launch to see if it had a different address. It did. The correct address is http://http://www.dubli-connect.com/Subscribe
I registered using our login info for dubli. Pretty easy to do. I read the Terms and Conditions and saw that the license fee is month to month. We could cancel at anytime. (The site asks that you give it 90 days to see if its helpful.) We paid the $14.95 for one month.
At this point it came to the Connect subscription site. On the site there is an icon to click to download and install cinch. (The subscription is for Connect – the website. Cinch is a program that runs on your desktop and is free. More about the functions of the two in later posts.)
We downloaded Cinch with no problems. It immediately showed the number of credits we have left in our account which meant that it had successfully connected to dubli.
Then I began attempting to import some contacts. I have a file of contacts that I had ealier saved in .csv format. It was easy to browse to the file and Connect immediately recognized it and brought up the info from the file. It asked that I idnetify each column of data and required that at least First Name, Last Name, and e-mail be identified. I also had some phone numbers that I labeled. Very easy and intuitive.
Then it asked that I identify each contact as either 1) a BA (Business Associate) 2) Potential BA 3) Customer or 4) Potential Customer. I did this – again easy. (I dumped all that I didn’t really know into Potential Customer.)
Then I pushed ‘Continue’ which is the place that the software really begins to take the file and the infor you provided to begin the import process. Things went well for the first 5 contacts. Then (at 13% done), the program froze. I noticed that the Cinch program I had open also froze. I had to cancel, and, I presume, lost all of the info that I had entered.
I haven’t been back in yet to see if anything was saved. I’ll post that with the next update, coming soon.
